Hello everyone,
I'm Amanda; a wife, mother and just someone who loves to play in the kitchen!!
I've been cooking since childhood, and have fond
memories of playing "restaurant" with my parents as a child.
Now that I'm a mom and playing with my daughter in the kitchen, I figured
I would extend some good food, tips and ideas your way!
Please feel free to hang out and if you have any questions, just ask!

Thursday, April 2, 2015

The perfect sugar cookie

Hi, everyone! Welcome back! For this months cookie-of-the-month, I thought I would put up the perfect sugar cookie recipe! These are great for decorating, either with royal icing, or with piping icing! I decided to frost them, and put some cute little egg candies on the top - my daughter loved this!

My husband loves soft sugar cookies; I'm normally not a huge fan. They just don't have a lot of flavor to me. Well, the sugar cookies you buy in the store don't have a lot of flavor. They just taste like you're eating cardboard, and I'm not going to waste my time with that!

These cookies are soft and full of flavor!

I'm not going to lie, I think I put more of these away than my husband did....all in the name of research, of course! Ha!

Here's your grocery list for this one:

3 sticks of butter, unsalted, softened

4 1/2 C All purpose flour

4 1/2 tsp baking powder

3/4 tsp Kosher salt

1 1/2 C granulated sugar

3 large eggs

5 tsp vanilla extract

Decorations of choice!

This dough actually comes together pretty quickly, and gets a good amount of its flavor from the vanilla extract, so if you want it to have a different flavoring, try a different extract! A lemon extract would be lovely...or orange, or almond...well, you get the idea!

To start off with, put the Kosher salt, baking powder in a large bowl, and mix well.

Setting the bowl aside, in the bowl of your mixer (or, in another large bowl, if you have a hand mixer), put all 3 sticks of butter in, and mix until your butter is light and fluffy!

With your mixer running on low, add in the sugar, then beat in the eggs, one at a time, allowing the previous egg to fully incorporate into the mixture before adding the next.

It will look like a curdled mess at this point, but that's okay. With your mixer running on low, slowly add in the flour mix, and mix until this has just come together. This is very important: you don't want to over mix this dough! This will make for a tough cookie! So, seriously, just mix this until the flour and butter mixture have come together.

Cover this with plastic wrap (for some reason, I moved my dough back to the flour bowl. I'm not sure why. You can leave it in the same mixing bowl if you'd like!), and place your dough in the fridge for at least an hour to rest.

After resting, pull your dough out, and preheat your oven to 350*, scoop your dough out into little 1 inch balls, and line them up onto a parchment paper lined baking sheet. Once all of your dough balls are lined up, gently squish down the tops, and bake them for 8-10 minutes. You don't want these to brown, and I have found that 9 minutes in my oven is the perfect time.